By ALLEN G. BREED, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published 10:00 pm, Wednesday, November 23, 2005

CARY, N.C. -- The joke around here is that this town's name is really an acronym for "Containment Area for Relocated Yankees."

As far as Vernon Yates is concerned, they haven't been contained well enough.

Nearly surrounded by pricey subdivisions, the cinderblock Yates Grocery and Farm Supply sells neither anymore. As if things weren't bad enough, style maven Martha Stewart has chosen this Raleigh suburb to build a signature neighborhood of houses designed after her homes in Maine and New York.

Holding court near a pot bellied stove, the 69-year-old man in the suspenders and NASCAR shirt laments that his old customers have been replaced by fast-talking, SUV-driving Northerners who don't seem to be able to read a STOP sign.

"It's all gone," Yates, pausing for another spit of tobacco juice, says of the Southern town of his youth. "Everything is completely different from what it used to be."

Things are indeed changing in the South -- including the notion of what it means to be "Southern."

The term conjures a variety of images. Magnolias, front-porch swings and sweet tea for some; football, stock cars and fried chicken for others; lynchings, burning crosses and civil rights marches for still others.

We've had the Solid South, the Old South and the New South. But are we heading toward a "No South"?

As the South's population booms -- projected to comprise 40 percent of the nation's population by 2030 -- a new Associated Press-Ipsos poll finds that the percentage of people in the region identifying themselves as "Southerners" is slowly shrinking.

The AP-Ipsos poll conducted this past month found 63 percent of people living in the region identified themselves as Southerners. That mirrors a trend from a University of North Carolina analysis of polling data that found a decline of 7 percentage points on the same Southern identity question between 1991 and 2001, to 70 percent.

Are the qualities that have long been ascribed to the South really true anymore? Are Southerners really more hospitable than other Americans? Does family really count for more down South? Are depth of faith, loyalty to home, reverence for history and sense of place identifiably "Southern" traits?

The South has become "sort of like a lifestyle, rather than an identity anymore," James Cobb, author of the newly published "Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity," would argue. "The things now we would base Southern distinctiveness on are so ethereal."

And sometimes contradictory: In a region that once tried to break away from the Union, people are generally considered more patriotic than the rest of Americans; in a place where black people were oppressed for hundreds of years, poll after poll shows them identifying themselves as "Southern" even more often than white people do.

New York City-born Bob Petrolino has lived in Raleigh for 30 years and has heard his share of snide remarks about "damned Yankees." When the local paper recently ran a landfill story with the headline "N.C. set to become Yankee dump," he fired off an angry letter wondering when we'd finally get beyond the Civil War references.

"I find a lot of people who are still fighting that war," the 71-year-old IBM retiree said. "They still have that chip on their shoulder, like, 'Hey, we would have been better off if you'd never come here.' "

About a third of the Southern residents responding to the AP poll say they were born outside the region. But of those born in and living in the South, only 77 percent choose to call themselves Southern.

William Andrew Johnson was born in Savannah, Ga., and lives just outside Charleston, S.C. -- where the first shot of the Civil War was fired. But he rejects the label "Southerner."

Why? Because of the political baggage he associates with the term.

"I'm not a red-stater at all," says the 61-year-old retired investment banker from Mount Pleasant, whose family has been in the region since the 1800s. "You know how a Southerner defines 'patriotic'? He supports any and every war."

So how do you measure patriotism?

Studies have found that people in the region enlist in the military out of proportion to their percentage of the overall population. But that could be as much a factor of economics or the predominance of military installations in the region as love of country.

And what about the so-called Bible Belt? Are Southerners really more religious than other Americans?

Church attendance figures compiled by David Olson, director of the American Church Research Project, show Southerners are much more likely than the average American to go to church -- though, as a region, their Midwestern brethren have a slight edge.

The Arbitron broadcast rating service finds that Southern dwellers are 48 percent more likely than people in the rest of the country to listen to religious radio programming.

And what of the closeness of extended families associated with the South?

Six of the states in the top 10 for highest divorce rates are in the South.

And the Census Bureau recently reported that the South is home to seven of the top 10 states with the highest percentages of out-of-wedlock births. (The Census counts Delaware and Maryland as Southern states.)

The South is now the nation's most industrialized region; though traditional textile employment and the like has largely moved offshore, the region has attracted high-profile employers such as automakers.

About three quarters of Southerners now live in metropolitan areas.

But if you're looking for the "real South," retired Dallas salesman Patrick Phillips says don't bother going to Charlotte, N.C., Birmingham, Ala., or even Atlanta, the presumptive capital of the New South. It's not there.

"I think the true Southerner is pretty much lost in the metropolitan area in today's time," says the 56-year-old Tulsa, Okla., native, who identifies himself as a Southerner.

"I think you have to get off in the back roads of the Southern states to really get into it again."

The AP found that people who live in rural areas are much more likely than their urban and suburban counterparts to consider themselves Southern.

For novelist Cassandra King, who grew up on a southern Alabama peanut farm, the South will always be "the agrarian South of the hardworking, reddened-neck farm family."

"Southern identity," she says, "comes from the red clay or white sand or black dirt which produces our peanuts and corn and okra and field peas and sweet potatoes."

The region is still set apart by its poverty, and some old stereotypes hold water.

Eight of the top 10 states with the highest percentages of mobile homes are in the South, as are nine of the states with the highest rates of adult toothlessness.

Other stereotypes are way off.

States with the highest percentage of households without indoor plumbing? Six of the top 10 are in the West and Northeast.

And while you can marry your first cousin in Massachusetts, New York and Rhode Island, it's legally taboo in Kentucky, Mississippi and West Virginia.